The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

1

THE BUILDING

The Empire State’s

Ambitious mass

Is, take it from

The critics, class.

—Price Day, The New Yorker, 1932

Before we set out on the story of the Empire State Building, I want to make one point perfectly clear: This book is about the building in Manhattan at 350 Fifth Avenue, on the west side of the avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets, block number 835, lot number 41. The building is 102 stories high, 1,250 feet tall—1,454 feet if you include the television antenna. You might think me oddly pedantic to point out these facts, but I want to reduce the chance for any misunderstandings.

There was, and still is, another Empire State Building in Manhattan, the existence of which, never very widely known in the first place, was eclipsed by the glory of the mighty structure at Thirty-fourth Street. The other Empire State Building, at 640 Broadway on the southeast corner of Bleecker Street, is a far different structure from its uptown namesake. A New York Sun reporter stumbled upon the building in 1932, and described it as a rather drab, gray stone structure of nine stories, extending some distance east on Bleecker Street. Its chief occupants were two firms of pants manufacturers, a window-cleaning company, and the Millinery Workers Union. A candy and cigar store occupied the ground-floor corner. Why the Broadway building was called the Empire State when it was built in 1897 is a mystery—perhaps the builder simply wanted to celebrate the state the building was in—but the name was carved in stone above the doorway until the building was improved. The name is now obliterated by a piece of greenish material. Although the accident of names seems the only link between the two Empire State Buildings, the superlatives biggest, largest tenuously link them as well. The building on Broadway at Bleecker Street was designed by De Lemos & Cordes, the architects of two of the biggest, largest department stores in the world—the Siegel-Cooper Store on Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, and the Macy’s at Herald Square. For the record, this story is not about the building on Broadway at Bleecker Street. It is about the landmark building on Fifth Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets.

The Empire State Building is a landmark in both meanings of the word—it is a lowercase l landmark in that it marks the land, and it is a landmark in what some people regard as a higher order of landmark. In its geographic sense, the building stands majestically alone in the mountain range of New York’s skyscrapers. It serves to provide your bearings, acting as a mark you can use to triangulate. You can see it from SoHo and Little Italy, from Broadway and Seventy-fifth Street or from Adams Street in downtown Brooklyn, from the New Jersey Turnpike or the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge. It became a designated New York City landmark in 1981, the year of the building’s golden jubilee; it was listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places in 1982; and, in 1986, the National Parks Service recognized it as a National Historic Landmark.

As an uppercase L landmark, it fulfills all the qualifications for designation as set down by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission—it has special historical, cultural, and aesthetic value, and is an important part of the city’s historical and architectural heritage. In the frequently cantankerous world of landmark designation, no witness spoke against designation at the hearing.¹ More important, perhaps, the Empire State was designated for some of the most elemental reasons. The report prepared by the commission’s Anthony W. Robins began by saying that the building was the best-known symbol of New York City, and ended by saying that it remains New York’s preeminent landmark. The building has no competition. It is peerless.

In both uses of landmark, the Empire State Building looms large in the legend of New York. No longer the world’s tallest building, or even the city’s tallest, it proudly wore the title of World’s Tallest Building from the day it opened in 1931 until it was relegated to second place with the coming of the first of the World Trade Towers in 1972. With the completion of the second tower in 1973, it dropped to third place. The construction of the Sears Tower in Chicago has since dropped the Empire State Building another notch in the ratings.

None of this has diminished the affection people feel for the building. It still swells the breasts of New Yorkers and makes hearts beat faster, and it still attracts more than 2 million visitors a year. The building’s splendor and lift, its very being remains a magical presence, a cynosure for the city’s residents, a mecca for visitors. Language barriers and social inhibitions evaporate as tourists ask complete strangers to take their pictures in the Empire State’s lobby. Their joy is manifest, their obvious eagerness to record their visit for posterity breaking down all hesitancies. The stranger smilingly obliges.

People still go to the top to admire the view, they still snatch up little replicas of the building with thermometers stuck in the façades, they still marvel at the building’s power and glory. From its inception, that was the whole idea—the power and the glory. I don’t want to give away the plot, but titanic forces were at play in the building’s conception, design, and construction. Planned in the expansive twenties, it opened in the constrictive thirties. The building suffered, but it endured, and it endures still.

People felt comfortable with the building from the first time they saw it, as if the building had become a fast friend at first meeting. Praise for the building’s architects poured in from peers, press, and the public from opening day. Its appeal to the layman is palpably enormous, said The New Yorker. In spite of Frank Lloyd Wright’s characteristically sweeping statement that our modern skyscrapers are all the same, we claim that this one is distinctly different, its difference and distinction lying in the extreme sensitiveness of its entire design. Architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon endowed it with such clean beauty, such purity of line, such subtle uses of material, that we believe it will be studied by many generations of architects, a hazardous prophecy in these days of change.

Just as the Empire State Building rose above every other structure in New York, so it towered over its competitors at the exposition of the Architectural League of New York in 1931. No other work exhibited received more comment, either from laymen or members of the profession, said The New York Times.

For his work, for his masterful treatment of an office building, architect William F. Lamb was awarded the Architectural League’s Medal of Honor in Architecture for 1931. The jury included architects Ely Jacques Kahn and John W. Root, Jr., and sculptors Adolph Alexander (A. A.) Weinman and Herbert Adams. Lamb insisted on sharing the honor with his partners, Richmond H. Shreve and Arthur Loomis Harmon, although both Shreve and Harmon gave Lamb full credit for the design from day one. Lamb had faced the necessity of meeting the impossible demand for speed in construction, Shreve said, and for that alone Lamb deserved the laurels.

The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded their Medal of Honor to the designers for 1931, given for distinguished work and high professional standing. The citation reads, In the monumental design of a great office building they have made a genuine contribution to architecture. The noble simplicity of this outstanding structure makes it an inspiring landmark in our city. According to Stephen F. Voorhees, president of the chapter and chairman of the jury, the award was not customarily based on work performed on any one building, but in this case the jury specifically recognized the accomplishment in the Empire State.

The Fifth Avenue Association awarded the Empire State Building its gold medal for design, which was architecturally excellent from top to bottom.² The association’s architectural committee, including architects Joseph H. Freedlander, Charles S. Peabody, and Chester Aldrich, was unanimous in its estimation of the Empire State Building’s worth, which spoke eloquently of the high regard with which not only laymen but architects and builders view this great structure, said Captain William J. Pedrick, the association’s president in 1931.

In 1955, the American Society of Civil Engineers selected the Empire State Building as one of the seven greatest engineering achievements in America’s history—the only wonder conceived, financed, owned, and managed by private industry.³

The Empire State Building was the biggest building anyone had ever known and one of the most pleasing aesthetically, and in all likelihood the building would have received laurels on its own merits. But carefully placed press releases from the day former governor Al Smith held a press conference in 1929 to announce the building’s coming resulted in one positive news story after another. Its size and scale could not be readily put into perspective, so its promoters sought a way. The building was immediately billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World, with the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World faring poorly in comparison. A later generation of owners continued the hyperbole with claims that more people visited the Empire State Building in a single year than visited the original Seven Wonders throughout recorded history. For the lobby floor’s north aisle, in 1963 they commissioned eight original artworks depicting the seven original wonders plus the eighth. The endurance of the Empire State Building sets it apart from the ancient wonders. Of the seven, no trace remains of four of them, a few fragments remain of two of them, and only the Great Pyramid remains, although it is missing some of its top stones. The Eighth Wonder remains in all its glory, and then some.

In 1931, Washington Star writer Israel Klein included the building as one of the seven wonders of the new world. He thought the Empire State represented the climax of skyscraper construction and placed it in a league with the flood-prevention work on the Mississippi, with Boulder Dam, the two-hundred-inch telescope for Mount Wilson Observatory, the electrified Cascade Tunnel system in Washington, the Panama Canal, and the George Washington Bridge. A story in a 1958 issue of Holiday magazine compared the building to both modern and ancient wonders: If the Eiffel Tower were piled atop the great pyramid of Cheops, the writer claimed, the Empire State Building would exceed their combined height by thirty-eight feet.

The Empire State Building is the twentieth-century New York building. The Chrysler Building might be glitzier, Lever House might be a purer example of modernism, and two of the city’s most banal buildings might be taller. But for the true heartbeat of a New Yorker, it’s the Empire State Building.

It became an instant icon for the city and its age. In 1931, a Macy’s shop window exhibited the history of men’s clothes from 1812. Saying that clothes follow the demands of progress, the window dressers backdropped each style with a symbol for its age. The iconographic chronology began with City Hall and ended with the Empire State Building.

The construction job was celebrated on Broadway the week the building opened in May 1931. Major Edward Bowes celebrated the construction of the building in a stage show at the Capitol Theater that he believed ranked as more than a great complement to Marion Davies’s Cosmopolitan production, It’s a Wise Child. In a special series of sets designed by Arthur Knorr, the production told the story of the rise of the Empire State Building in music, dance, and pantomime. Beginning with the barren site and working up through the various stages of girders pushing their way upward to form a new skyline for Manhattan, the production ended with a dirigible moving across stage.

The Short Line Motor Coach Service, whose local bus terminal was in the Dixie Hotel on Forty-third Street, used the image of the building on the cover of its New York schedule (Philadelphia was represented by its City Hall; Washington, D.C., by the Capitol Building). The New York Central Railroad used the building in posters advertising its Saturday excursion fares to the city. The copy plugged the building as the city’s latest attraction and urged passengers to visit it on their trip to the Boston Braves–Brooklyn Dodgers game at Ebbets Field or to the Giants–Philadelphia game at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan.

When the Museum of the City of New York opened its doors on Fifth Avenue in 1932, a diorama by Dwight Franklin showed the erection of the Empire State’s steel framework, a scene that remained on view until the early 1990s and is probably etched as deeply in the minds of New York kids as the image of the bare-breasted Indians at the American Museum of Natural History was to Holden Caulfield.

The substantive facts of the building strain credulity in their enormity and precision. According to one of the Empire State’s architects, Richmond H. Shreve, a wind blowing at 4,500,000 pounds pressure would be required to knock it over; the building was vertical to within five-eighths of an inch; its weight was 365,000 tons, but its great load was distributed so evenly that the weight on any given square inch was no greater than that normally borne by a French heel. There are 10 million bricks in the building, 27 miles of main and counterweight rails used for the tracks of the elevators, about 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone, and 6,400 windows. The completed building contains 37 million cubic feet. The 210 columns at the base support the entire weight of the building.

Some of these statistics might reinforce the commonly expressed fear that Manhattan Island would give way under the strain of supporting so many skyscrapers and would collapse into the surrounding waters. However, engineers point out that the city is built upon solid rock, and the great amount of stone removed in excavations is heavier than the completed skyscrapers. The stone excavated for the Chrysler Building, for instance, weighed twice as much as the building itself. Architect Shreve computed that the Empire State weighed no more than a forty-five-foot rock pile that might cover the site.

By virtue of its size, records were set up like standing dominoes and fell just as easily, and some of the records were taken very seriously by promoters. It ranked, for instance, as New York Telephone Company’s largest single installation, which the telephone company touted. In the building’s first stage of occupancy, about six thousand pairs of house cables and four thousand sets of wires to the central office were installed, as well as more than five thousand station telephones and more than three thousand trunk-line switchboards.

As the tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building was used as a yardstick for everything from Fleischmann’s yeast to great ocean liners. First, the ocean liners.

A custom had grown up in the early twentieth century of illustrating the latest queen of the seas stacked up against the reigning queen of the sky, with the Lusitania, for instance, illustrated standing bow-up next to the Singer Tower. Although the flack for the French Line did not depict the Normandie next to the Empire State to demonstrate the length of the 1,020-foot-long ship, at the ship’s launch in 1935 they claimed that if the ship were placed on Fifth Avenue it would stretch from Thirtieth Street to the northern side of Thirty-fourth Street, and, if stood on end, it would reach almost to the top of the Empire State Building (it still had 230 feet to go, or about another quarter, but who’s counting?).

In attempts at relating the height of New York skyscrapers, some foreign publications made legitimate comparisons with commonly known monuments back home. The London Daily Mail said in 1931 that the Empire State was nearly nine times higher than Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. (A multiple of the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral might have made more sense, but it was an honest effort.) And for years, The Michelin Green Guide to New York stacked the Eiffel Tower against the Chrysler Building, since the Chrysler Building was the first building taller than the Eiffel Tower.

Sometimes the building was used as the basis for showing the enormity of something unfathomable. Modern Mechanics and Inventions held that if the thickness of a postage stamp represented the record of human history, the Empire State Building would not be high enough to represent the rest of astronomical time. To show the strength of the new two-hundred-inch telescope at Mount Wilson, the Philadelphia Inquirer said that the point of a needle, held some yards away from the lens, would appear as large as the great 102-story Empire State Building from a distance of a few blocks. Critical information was a little vague in the newspaper’s statement, and the illustration that showed the building standing next to a needle its size was not much more precise. Some comparisons were even more specious, however. One had the Empire State Building more than four times as high as the Tower of Babel.

Manufacturers, hoping to cash in on the building’s celebrity status, frequently made comparisons between the building and their product. Kelvinator advertised that it used nearly 6 million square feet of porcelain in 1933—enough porcelain to cover the Empire State Building seven times! Kellogg’s Cereals claimed that once every eight hours the company used enough Waxtite paper to encase the entire Empire State Building in the same airtight, moisture-proof Waxtite bag that protected the delicate flavor and crispness of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, and the company’s other famous cereals!

Childs Restaurants almost apologetically advertised in 1938 that one of their data hounds had figured out that two days’ servings of its pancakes (each cake was three-eighths of an inch thick) would make a stack as high as the Empire State Building.

Scribner’s Magazine combined two of the most popular cultural events of the 1930s into one enormous bit of useless information. Gone with the Wind was published June 30, 1936, and by Christmas of that year a million copies had been sold, setting a record as the fastest-selling volume in history. Scribner’s claimed that if all the copies of the 1,037-page best-seller were piled one atop another, the stack would be 250 times taller than the Empire State Building.

Clay Morgan, publicity director of the French Line, who had probably come up with the old saw that had the Normandie stacked up against the Empire State Building, claimed that all the linens stocked aboard the Normandie—tablecloths, napkins, sheets, etc.—could completely cover the Empire State Building. To show the nonsense of Morgan’s dispatch, Harper’s Bazaar whimsically illustrated the building wrapped with the Normandie’s linens stitched together, with a bow tied around it.

The Wizette Corset Company cashed in on the famous shape of the Empire State Building in an effort to plug a new device that enabled women to get into and out of their product more comfortably. Wizette depicted the building magically unzipped to reveal within the new smart girdle with the Improved Slide Fastener.

Ads that bore a remarkable similarity in design to Ripley’s Believe It or Not ran as Don Byrd’s Amazing But True. One Amazing But True was an ad for Oxydol detergent, which showed a woman pulling the Empire State Building by a rope. The caption read: The energy women use in a year to wash clothes would move the Empire State Building a block if translated into moving power. Oxydol would save nearly half this energy.

An ad for Sinclair Gasoline showed the building being picked up by a crane. The headline came complete with asterisk: ONE GALLON COULD LIFT THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING 1 3/4 INCHES. 99 MILLION FOOT-POUNDS* PER GALLON. Amazing as it may seem, the copy claimed, there is enough energy stored up in a single gallon of the powerful new H-C gasoline, if it could be fully utilized, to hoist the world’s tallest building 1 3/4 inches in the air. The asterisk noted that Foot-pound [was] the amount of work required to lift one pound one foot. Due to friction and other losses, no machine yet built can convert into useful work all the potential energy in any gasoline…

People have been compared with the building. Heavyweight boxer Primo Carnera was described as being built like the Empire State Building in 1931, but then, a few months later, Leo Pinetzki, the world’s mountain-weight wrestling champion and his Empire State Building physique—283 pounds, six feet nine inches tall, with a 96-inch reach, superseded Primo Carnera as sport’s largest mammoth.

The capacity of other buildings has been compared with it. Virginia’s Harry F. Byrd in 1937 claimed that the federal government was paying rent for office space equal to fifty-two buildings the size of the Empire State.

A car card in the subways that ran under the title OUR TOWN ODDITIES in March 1942 contained a startling bit of information: The Empire State’s mooring mast—just the mooring mast atop the building—was higher than any office building in Europe. (It wasn’t, I hope, just because it was sitting atop a 1,050-foot base.)

Then there was the entry made by Fleischmann’s yeast: From the small tube of live yeast plants that Charles Fleischmann brought from Europe in 1868 had grown enough yeast to fill eleven Empire State Buildings solid.

The building has been a favorite subject for model builders in various media. A Tacoma, Washington, man used 135 decks of cards to build his house of cards in the shape of the Empire State Building. A four-foot-high model of the building was carved in soap. T. B. Wu, a twenty-six-year-old student, spent six months making a ten-foot-high model out of plaster and powdered sugar. Fourth and fifth graders from the Kelvedon Hatch Primary School in Brentwood, England, built a seven-foot, eight-inch model of the building from 3,212 matchboxes. And a two-foot model of it was made entirely out of anthracite coal. A model kit in book form that only required the model maker to cut and paste to build his own Empire State Building (so easy even an adult can do it) was published by Perigee Books in the 1980s, and in the 1990s Milton Bradley produced a super challenging three-dimensional puzzle whose 902 foam-backed pieces created a model of the building over three feet tall.

A fairly common practice among architects and developers was to have reasonably exact plaster of paris models show how the structure would look when completed, and the Empire State’s team was no exception. A seven-foot-high, 525-pound model was built that was valued at $3,000. It was photographed for publicity shots, and it was used as a stand-in for the real thing in 1931 when the Fox Film Company shot the talking picture Skyline. Models of the Empire State, Chrysler, and Irving Trust Buildings were shown in 1931 at the American pavilion—itself a reproduction of Mount Vernon—at the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris. A model of the Empire State Building was shown in an exhibit illustrating the development of buildings throughout the ages at the Museum of Science and Industry in the Daily News Building in 1932. A model was shown at the 1939 World’s Fair. And, of course, it is depicted in the Little Apple, the model of the entire city in the New York City Building at the Queens Museum of Art.

Tony Lordi, an art professor at County College in Morris, New Jersey, views the building as the icon for New York. The six-foot models of the building that he created in the late 1980s were either found objects that Lordi assembled to create the armature of the building—wondrous structures built of bits and pieces of old metal that he somehow put together in the form of the building—or models that he built of plywood and then covered with all sorts of whimsical objects. One model was covered in mink, another was covered in mirrors, and a third was covered in tacky souvenirs available at tourist attractions, a wonderfully convoluted statement. He was inspired to make his own interpretations of the Empire State in part because of his visit to the building when he was five. His parents bought him a model of the building that doubled as a pencil sharpener.

Life magazine’s Walter McQuade was convinced that the building was designed to make a good souvenir in miniature to be carried away by tourists. The miniatures have been the biggest sellers over the years. Fifty years after the building opened, the manager of the building’s souvenir shop estimated that the anniversary year would see sales of eighty thousand miniatures in various versions—a two-inch paperweight, a six-inch piggybank, a nine-inch thermometer—but there was no mention of the pencil sharpener that Tony Lordi had as a child.

Perhaps the earliest fictionalized account of the Empire State Building appeared in Swiss Family Manhattan, a children’s fantasy by Christopher Morley published in 1932. The family escapes a wrecked dirigible in a balloon raft that sets them down atop the Empire State Building, which is still under construction. Muddle-headed father construes the structure as a great, giant tree set amidst stony clefts and sierras, sometimes topped with floating plumes of steam, suggesting either fires for cooking or sacrifice, or perhaps that these peaks were of volcanic origin. They find builders’ materials that prove useful in constructing a shelter for themselves, and they hide from the anthropoids—the workers—whose tastes in humor the father divined were primitive…from certain rough drawings on plastered walls where they were working. One of the boys is more circumspect and holds that the family had landed in a great edifice that showed all evidences of a careful plan.

The Empire State Building has appeared in about ninety movies, but no doubt the most famous is King Kong. Just as the building was billed as The Eighth Wonder of the World, so was the movie’s tragic hero, whose only real flaw was that he fell in love with beauty, and it was beauty that killed the beast. A Frank Buck–like character named Carl Denham sets off to shoot a movie on an island where prehistoric creatures roam about behind a wall, where he realizes that if this picture had a love interest it would gross twice as much. The blonde who is to appear in his movie provides it. In the denouement, a manacled Kong is on display on a stage in New York.⁴ The lovesick beast breaks loose, finds the blonde, and tries to escape to safety with her atop the Empire State Building, where he symbolically and literally makes a defiant stand against our civilization. A squadron of combat planes finally shoots him off the tower, but not before he has gently and lovingly placed the hysterically screaming blonde on the rooftop platform.

The movie still looms large in legend. A January 1995 New Yorker cover by Bruce McCall showed three great apes sitting around on rooftops reading Variety and playing cards while awaiting their turn to audition at the top. The cover was called King Kong Call.

Like Will Rogers, screenwriters in the 1930s might have learned all they knew from what they read in the newspapers. The Jersey City Journal reported that the first marriage performed in the tower was in April 1932, when Doris Averell Welchangs, of Springfield, Massachusetts, married William Holmes, of Weehawken, New Jersey. They chose what they described as the nearest place to heaven they could find, a phrase that might sound familiar. And The Brooklyn Eagle told of a young woman in December 1935 who was seen pacing restlessly up and down the eighty-sixth-floor promenade. The guards were worried that she was about to jump. She was upset, but not suicidal. She had met a young man on the tower the year before and they had promised to meet again on that particular day. He had not shown up. Another familiar ring.

Here was the stuff of Love Affair, An Affair to Remember I, An Affair to Remember II, and, by extension, Sleepless in Seattle. The plot to the first of them is basically the plot to the first three: boy (Charles Boyer) meets girl (Irene Dunne). Each is to marry another for money. They fall in love onboard ship, and as they sail up the Hudson, they decide that each has to prove himself worthy of the other and get real jobs. To see what progress has been made toward unassisted solvency, they decide to meet in six months in the nearest place we have in New York to heaven, the top of the Empire State Building. On the day, Dunne does not look at the traffic light on Fifth Avenue but instead glances at the top of the building in her excitement at seeing him there. She is hit by a cab. Boyer waits ’til midnight, pacing anxiously, and departs, disillusioned.

People have succeeded in vanquishing the building’s verticality: They have walked up it. Sources disagree on who the first walker was, but building guard Pete McGuire was generally acknowledged as the first to make the climb. Next to do it were two small boys who arrived at the top unannounced after slipping past guards. Although they had properly trespassed and created a hazard to themselves, everyone secretly admired their gumption and derring-do.

Publicists soon learned to exploit such feats. In 1937, the observatory’s manager, Julia Chandler, heard that the forty-nine-year-old A. W. Aldrich, a Vermont farmer and mountain climber, volunteered to make the climb, and she made arrangements for the first officially sanctioned climb to the top, which Aldrich performed in the full glare of publicity. He climbed the 1,860 steps, each one with a seven-inch rise, in thirty-six minutes. He plodded flat-footed, Indian-style, insisting it was easier on the leg muscles. He neither drank nor smoked, because it don’t do nobody any good. He had not married, either, but The New York American pointed out that there did not seem any correlation between that fact and his Alpine technique. Two Morris High School juniors from The Bronx, Marilyn Milstein and Helen Broan, were the next to climb it. They distinguished themselves as the first of their gender to accomplish the feat, in September 1940. One of them was photographed after the climb, soaking her feet. The feat had made them sore.

Walking up had become old hat by 1978, when the New York Road Runner Club started an annual footrace to the top. The first was won by August Gary Muhrcke, a former New York City fireman, who ran up the eighty-five flights in twelve minutes, thirty-two seconds. He did not, however, enter the race in 1979 to defend his title. Muhrcke had drawn fire for his feat—he was drawing a tax-free disability pension of $11,822 a year from the fire department for a back injury. The Times editorialized that the least he could do for his pension was run up and down stairs warning people of danger by yelling Fire! Fire!

The Empire State was the goal of another kind of race—the Great Atlantic Air Race, now memorialized by a plaque at London’s Post Office Tower, the other end of the thirty-five-hundred-mile dash. The plaque reads: Transatlantic Air Race. This plaque marks the starting and finishing point of the Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race, 4th–11th May, 1969, in which 360 competitors travelled between the Post Office Tower and the Empire State Building in New York. The Air Race commemorated the 50th anniversary of the first Transatlantic flight in 1919 by Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown. Competitors used everything from regularly scheduled commercial airline flights to Royal Navy Phantom jets, jump-jet Harriers, Piper Comanches, hot-air balloons, and World War II Spitfires. Prince Michael, the queen’s cousin, entered the race, as did race-car driver Sterling Moss, neither of whom won their categories. Clement Freud took the honors for the London–New York race on a scheduled Aer Lingus flight (eight hours, four minutes, eighteen seconds). According to the Daily Mail’s New York bureau chief Jeffrey Blyth, the Empire State Building set aside a section of the eighty-sixth-floor observatory as a check-in area, the building dedicated elevators to the competitors, and when Sir John Alcock’s niece Anne arrived, she was bearing a package for Building Manager Bob Tinker. She had been appointed a licensed mail-carrier by the British postal system for the express purpose of delivering a block of fiftieth-anniversary Alcock and Brown stamps, which were then to be sent on to the postmaster general.

The building had its own post office, but telephones had replaced the mails for speedy communication by the early 1930s, when the exchanges, which took neighborhood or institutional names, served as true area codes. The building’s management office, its luncheon club, and its public relations office all had LOngacre numbers (Longacre was the original name of Times Square). The building’s advertising agency, the Andrew Cone Agency (no relation to the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding), the pharmacy within the building, and the office of the Travelers Insurance Company in the building had PEnnsylvania numbers (named for the railroad station on Seventh Avenue).⁵ The exchange for the Empire State Building’s renting office at Madison Avenue between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets was CAledonia. This is a mystery number that the telephone company could not identify in 1995 as one of the recognized exchanges, and there is no apparent reason for CAledonia to be an exchange for numbers in the east thirties (there was a Caledonian Club at 846 Seventh Avenue, which had a CIrcle number because of its proximity to Columbus Circle). In addition to the renting office at CAledonia 5-8347, the Schrafft’s at 4 East Thirty-sixth Street had a CAledonia number, as did the Empire State (probably no relation to the building) Hunting and Fishing Club at 22 East Thirty-eighth Street.

The designers of the building were not superstitious and gave the building a thirteenth floor, not an unusual thing for an office building at the time. Only one major 1930s office building was not given a thirteenth floor, and it was Cross & Cross’s building at 570 Lexington Avenue, at Fifty-first Street.⁶ Abolition of the thirteenth floor was not ordinarily a concession to the superstition of the landlord or designer, but to that of tenants, and it occurred most frequently in buildings where you might lay your head or be dealing with life and death. Many apartment houses had floor numbers that skipped from twelve to fourteen. The Roosevelt Hotel had no thirteenth floor, and although there had been a thirteenth floor in the old Waldorf-Astoria and there was a thirteenth floor in the new one, the new hotel eliminated all room numbers ending in thirteen. Perhaps the most confusing floor-numbering system occurred at the Presbyterian Hospital. The floor numbering was normal from one to twelve, but then suddenly numbers stopped and letters were substituted for the floor numbers, beginning with M, the thirteenth letter.

Perhaps the thirteenth floor brought the Empire State bad luck. Its fans certainly felt unlucky in the early 1970s, as they stood by and watched helplessly as the World’s Tallest record went to the World Trade Towers. It was like a Brooklyn Dodger fan watching his beloved team go to Los Angeles. If the Empire State Building wasn’t going to remain the champ—and it had won the record fair and square, just as the Dodgers had finally won the Series—why did it have to lose to something so big, so boring, so banal? It was as if the Yankees—a machine for winning when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn—had won again.

The Empire State’s eccentric fans might not have mourned so if the title had gone to an interesting structure such as the conelike, 2,296-foot concrete tower planned for the Paris Exposition of 1937, which would have been more than a thousand feet higher than the Empire State Building and a worthy successor to the Eiffel Tower. Spiral ramps climbed the outside of the tower, the inside lane of the ramp for descending cars, the outside lane for ascending. Automobiles could climb to a height of 1,640 feet, where there would be a garage for five hundred cars and a restaurant for two thousand guests, as well as an inexplicable thing called a sun-cure station. The structure would have been called Phare du Monde, or Lighthouse of the World, with a beacon twenty-three thousand feet high. Or the building’s fans might have graciously relinquished the title to the Palace of the Soviets, upon which work was scheduled to begin in December 1938. It would have been twenty-three feet taller than the Empire State Building and topped with the world’s largest statue, a statue of Lenin that would have been three times the size of the Statue of Liberty. The patent impracticality doomed one proposal, and the coming of World War II doomed the other.

The Empire State was luckier. The building was boldly planned, and although the exigencies of the stock market crash halted other projects, work on the Empire State went forward at a record pace. The skyscraper is a slice of architectural and planning history, a slice of the history of the city, and worthy of being called a landmark. It is the city’s—and the world’s—greatest skyscraper.

¹One of the organizations endorsing the designation of the building as a landmark was the local community planning board. The chair at the time was Dan Biederman, who went on to head the Thirty-fourth Street Partnership, perhaps the single most important force for improving the district in the 1990s.

²This gave Shreve, Lamb & Harmon the second gold medal in a row from the Fifth Avenue Association. The firm had been awarded the gold in 1930 for its design of the Hollander Building at 3 East Fifty-seventh Street, a nine-story fireproof store and office structure.

³The other wonders: the Colorado River Aqueduct, Grand Coulee Dam, Hoover Dam, Panama Canal, San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, and Chicago’s sewage-disposal system.

⁴King Kong was shown, appropriately enough, at Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy, which, with the Hippodrome, might have been the only New York theaters with stages big enough to accommodate the real King Kong.

⁵People have often wondered if John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8 would have been a hit if it had been called 288, or if people would have been dancing to Glenn Miller’s 736-5000, the number of the Pennsylvania Hotel two blocks away from the Empire State Building. Somehow, those numbers don’t have the same ring.

⁶The building was designed as the RCA Building but was called the GE Building for most of its commercial life. To confuse things more, by the 1990s Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building was the GE Building.

2

THE SKYSCRAPER

As an unabashed New York booster,

I find it hard to admit something,

but Chicago was the cradle of

the American skyscraper.

—Architect Harvey Wiley Corbett

If you ask the man in the street to define skyscraper, he will no doubt wonder what kind of jerk you are. It’s a very tall building, he would probably say, which is a perfectly acceptable answer. Inherent in the word skyscraper, after all, is the essence of the building—it has to be tall, it has to scrape the sky.

Campaniles, steeples, and minarets are tall, but ordinarily there is only enough space within the structures for staircases. The rest is the structure itself. The reverse is the case with domes. They are shells, with vast interiors for effect. By contrast, a skyscraper is designed to be filled with space that can be used to commercial advantage. The structure has to be functional and remunerative. You find floors every twelve feet or so, floors that house desks and filing cabinets, lathes and sewing machines, factory and office workers. You find colonies of industry.

Richard Morris Hunt’s 260-foot Tribune Building was considered very tall when it was built in 1874. It had interior space that could be used to commercial advantage, and it scraped the sky, so you would think that it would qualify for skyscraperdom. By the 1890s, however, the Tribune Building would not be considered a skyscraper by strict definition. The standards for skyscrapers had changed. Technological advances, not the man-in-the-street’s perception, were defining them.

The Tribune Building had masonry walls that were load bearing—the walls helped to support the weight of the building. Every additional floor the building rose contributed that much weight for the walls below to bear, so the lower walls had to be made that much thicker. The thicker the walls, the less rentable space, a problem exacerbated by the fact that, in extreme cases, windows—a critical selling point—had to be made smaller. The goal of the skyscraper builder is to create bright and airy space, not to have it diminished. No sensible developer will sacrifice valuable rental space on the altar of height.

A skyscraper is a tall building whose weight is supported by a frame of steel or poured-in-place concrete with steel reinforcements. Unlike the load-bearing walls of a masonry structure, walls do not help support the average skyscraper.¹ The walls are attached to the frame in various ways, and do little more than keep in heat and keep out cold and dampness. Since the walls in a skyscraper are equally thin, top and bottom, they do not occupy a greater percentage of valuable space on the lower floors.

So long as the walls are impermeable, they can be made of just about any permanent material. Early skyscrapers might have had façades of brick or terra-cotta, both of which were ideal as fire retardants. Both were readily available and inexpensive. Grander buildings might have had stone façades, with ashlar—large blocks of stone cut to size at a quarry—that could be installed at the site. Later skyscrapers might have been given panels of metal, of steel or aluminum, even of glass to face the building.

A skyscraper and the human form are somewhat analogous. Your body is supported by a skeleton of bone, with muscle and cartilage holding it together. Your skin does not support the weight of your body; it simply hangs there. When your skin is pricked, you leak blood but you do not fall down. The average skyscraper is likewise supported by a skeleton, of steel. Its skin, or walls, are supported by the frame; they do not support the building. When the wall of a skyscraper is pricked, it leaks air, and unless its skeleton has suffered a seriously deleterious blow, the building does not fall down.

In the opinion of architects such as Harvey Wiley Corbett, skyscrapers were America’s great gift to architecture, the first new structural form since the ancient Romans invented the arch. Egypt had built with only one fundamental structural principle: the post and lintel. The clear span under the roof was limited by the length of a stone lintel supported on columns. Greece might have achieved a perfection of detail and refinement of proportion, but no new building principles were added to the basic Egyptian design. It was the Romans who devised the second new structural element—the masonry arch and dome—and used it on a grand scale. Not until the masonry arch came into being, and the consequent Gothic variations on the theme during the Middle Ages, could architects produce enclosed spaces of impressive vastness. However, if you weren’t interested in building vast interior spaces such as the nave of a cathedral, but wanted a tall commercial building, you found yourself in an architectural pickle if you used masonry walls to support the building.

Stone and wood had been the coin of the building realm until the arrival of cast iron in the middle of the nineteenth century. Until then the weight of buildings had been borne by their walls, but in 1848 James Bogardus used a skeleton of cast-iron posts and beams to support a building from within. Since the walls no longer bore the load, they could be freed from their former obligations.

Builders who used cast iron built essentially in the same manner as the builders of the Empire State Building. The posts and beams, and the windows and window frames were prefabricated in a factory and assembled at the site. A foundation was dug, then a cast-iron sill was set into a base. A hollow, cylindrical column was bolted perpendicular to the sill, just as later builders would set steel posts in concrete at the bedrock level. When a pair of adjoining posts was in place, a lintel was bolted to link them. The process continued horizontally and vertically, floors were laid, and a new style of building resulted. Interior spaces were a series of self-contained boxes, each an island, entire of itself. Since the units were self-supporting, there was no need for thick walls to support the load of the building. As a result, large expanses of windows punctuated by delicate cast-iron columns created a rhythmic balance outside and well-lit spaces inside.

But there were limits as to how high pure cast-iron buildings could rise, even how high masonry buildings could rise that incorporated iron to reinforce masonry. The material framing and supporting a building higher than seven or eight stories has to combine both compression and flexibility. Wrought iron has greater tensility than cast iron, but even wrought iron is rigid, ungiving, incapable of stretching compared with steel, whose properties include tensility and compression as well as resistance to fatigue. The likelihood of structural steel losing its strength, even under tremendous heat, is pretty slim. It yields very slowly. It bends and stretches, but it doesn’t break.

Henry Bessemer’s process of making steel was perfected by 1860, and soon steel was being used to reinforce stone and brick in buildings. In the 1880s, it occurred to architects that they could do with steel what had been done with cast iron: They could frame buildings.

Steel produced in the late nineteenth century already had qualities that made it the favored material of bridge builders such as John Roebling, who used it for the span and cables of the Brooklyn Bridge.² When engineers began to use steel for skyscraper construction, they ordered from the same shops—the steel-bridge shops that had supplied Roebling—because the ordinary steel mills rolled only standard and uniform shapes. The structural steel for a skyscraper called for columns and girders of hundreds of different lengths and strengths. Only bridge shops could fabricate the posts and beams to the specifications of the drawings; only they could fabricate the shapes required for girders and columns.

The development first of box columns and then of the I beam for use as posts and beams was critical to the skyscraper’s development. The thrust of an I beam as a post is toward its center, where the beam is thickest, the axis where opposing forces meet and neutralize each other. The post does not buckle. Used as a lintel, the thrust is down the I, and since that again is where the greatest thickness lies, again the beam does not buckle. Pressure, tension, and compression exist in varying degrees, but steel’s tensility will keep the I beam from buckling, cracking, or failing.

By the turn of the twentieth century, good wrought iron was rated as having a strength of about 50,000 pounds per square inch; steel’s rating was a conservative 65,000 pounds. Wrought iron was given an elastic limit of 25,000 pounds, steel 40,000. Within three decades, the estimates on steel were revised, a result of improved steel, granted, but more importantly, because tests were more scientific. Authorities by then claimed that not only was steel twenty times as strong as wood, it was four to five times as strong as iron.

One of the great differences between cast-iron construction and steel-frame construction, as the great builder Colonel William A. Starrett points out, was literally nuts and bolts. The elements of cast-iron buildings were bolted, but no bolt has the strength of a rivet. Steel-framed buildings were riveted. Driven red-hot into the punch holes, rivets fill up every interstice. When they cool, they are one with beam and column, an integral part, and beam and column become one with each other.

Of equal importance with these developments, no builder could reasonably hope to rent space above the sixth or seventh floor unless there was a way to get upstairs that was